


Tunica Intima

by spiderstanspiderstan



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Heart Attacks, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Venom Symbiote (Marvel), Science, in my defense i was left unsupervised, valentines day, venom does his best LUCAS impression, written as revision
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-28 12:51:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17787740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiderstanspiderstan/pseuds/spiderstanspiderstan
Summary: "This was a consequence of parasitism. Of early, misguided attempts at survival."Venom made a lot of mistakes, in his initial occoupation of Eddie Brock's body. When they catch up with them, he has no choice but to improvise- to learn in the moment how to save a human life.





	Tunica Intima

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Valentine's day y'all!

The heart of a host beats for two.

As a symbiote, Venom had not only placed his life in Eddie’s hands, but vested trust in his brain and lungs and bone marrow. Symbiosis on a hostile planet made him vulnerable, dependent as an embryo, reliant on someone else’s organs for filtering over nearly every necessity of life.  

And it was terrifying. Terrifying until Venom spent enough time in a human mind to comprehend how deeply he was loved. 

Here and now—in still-snowy February, curled up on the couch and watching The Shape of Water—there was nothing but security. Faith in their shared body came as easily as breathing, an act he’d grown accustomed to. 

So it was a shock when something went wrong. 

The leftmost of the arteries that fed their heart shuddered, then began to come apart inside itself, a section of epithelium flensing free right before it branched. Blood pooled suddenly between the layers, spurred by the speed of a two-step heartbeat of a circulatory system feeding them both, and began to clot. 

The world lit up with electrical signals; fireworks of pain rippling out through the pericardium and onwards from there. Arteries were difficult to invade—with urgency like this they had to be damaged to reach the lumen, the connective tissue on the outside serving its protective purpose too well. There was no time to weave between its fibers. 

“ _ Fuck, _ ” Eddie mumbled, pressing a fist to his chest.

Tearing through the tunica externa was awful, and  _ hurt him _ , hurt them both. 

Eddie reached for his phone and the dim thought of calling Dan swam through his mind, passing into the visible realm of memory as soon as his sweaty finger had grazed the contact number. 

Smooth muscle cells were easier to navigate, possible to squirm between, shaken by their desperate, spasming contraction. 

The phone began to ring. And ring, and ring, and ring. 

Venom chewed through the elastic inner membrane, reached the horrible mass of glued-together cells—  

Then the ever-present pounding of Eddie’s pulse stopped. Replaced itself with a dim hum.

And they both began to die. 

There was nothing worse in the world than those last few milliseconds of flickering consciousness, than the swell of white-hot terror, surging through their shared mind until the body went silent and limp, slumping to the hardwood floor. 

Dan’s number finally went through—to voicemail. 

  
Every instinct screamed to leave, to abandon a dying host. It was a claustrophobic, hellish thing. Reminiscent of Maria, of the slow failure of the body that served as shelter from the world. Like watching the atmosphere leech away, like seeing the apocalypse in action. 

The heart was mechanical. It could be manually worked. Squeezing down blood from the upper chambers to the lower and out, mimicking each natural beat. Forcibly crushing trembling ventricles in an awkward mime of biology at work. Working the diaphragm like bellows, even awkwardly positioned as they were, forcing oxygen in through a kinked airway. 

Watching cardiomyocytes die. 

Venom was alone. No sign of the other half of their shared mind, no flicker of memory or feeling from his other: just the gaping void where Eddie had been. It was  _ wrong,  _ different from the time before they’d bonded. That had been independence—this was raw, aching absence. This was Eddie being  _ gone _ . 

Klyntar couldn’t feel sadness; not in the way mammals did, not with the chaos of neurotransmitters and complex physiology—but this was a close, sickening thing. Wholly unnatural. Dark and suffocating, clouding his thoughts, sudden and overwhelming isolation as vast and cold as the void of space. 

The artery needed fixing, first of all. So the heart could be whole again. 

Tears budded up in Eddie’s closed eyes, dripped futilely through his eyelashes. 

It was a hodgepodge construction and it wouldn’t last, sealing off the artery around the clot, rerouting it with stolen cells, snatching elastin from the skin and muscle from the gut lumen; cobbling together a passable replacement before serious healing could be performed. It just had to support the normal flow of blood; just had to withstand that pressure… 

Scraping the clot away from the limp muscle tissue was the easiest part. The heart was barely alive; fluttering like it was struggling to keep itself intact. It felt so fucking  _ fragile _ , and it was—it could have been torn apart in seconds, destroyed by a simple touch. 

There was nothing to do but keep blood moving, to coax it down into the shuddering lower chambers. It was a jolting strain on the first set of valves, maybe hard enough to damage them—but the alternative was not trying. 

Crushing down the ventricles. The clicking sensation of valves snapping shut, and the further pressure to push the second valves open, taking so much force—it felt like he was breaking something. Like he was somehow killing him  _ further. _ Breaking him apart, a hundred times a minute. 

Venom cupped the heart, both inside and outside its sheath of the pericardium. Held it wholly. 

The human body was a bioelectric machine, a symphony of ion gradients and action potentials. 

And that fact gave them one last precarious chance. 

It was the risk of miscalculation, which made him hesitate for a fraction of a second. The risk of killing one of them, or both. The burn of poor perfusion, and the looming finality of failure. He was woefully unequipped; it took a lot of energy to drag together biomass in a rough facsimile of the organs he needed. There was no certainty in things like this—there was nothing Venom could do but pray to his vague idea of a god, and try to make this work. 

He pulled himself up into Eddie’s chest cavity, smothering the uneven flutter that had replaced his heartbeat. Performed the complex dance of chemistry necessary to build up energy, then delivered it all in a shock that seemed to split the world. 

There was silence. Exhaustion; the blunted aftermath of an act completely outside their bodies’ design. 

Then, void. 

* * *

When he woke—several hours later, going by the clock-like rhythm of melatonin levels—it was to the thudding of a weakened, lop-sided heartbeat. 

That, and voices, coming faintly through layers of muscle and bone. In the burst of energy, he had lost the hold on his connections to Eddie’s nervous system, and was suddenly away from his borrowed sight and hearing. But he could recognise a voice. 

Dan Lewis spoke in a warm, distant hum, and for a moment Venom focused on the all-encompasing glory of Eddie’s reply—the vivid vibration of his vocal folds, the confident motion of his lungs. The giddy, wonderful fact that he was still there to speak at all. 

Being this tired made human language fuzzy; Venom chose a more natural form of greeting—worming his way outwards, reestablishing connections and brushing bundles of nerves, the internal mirror of a kiss. 

The reply came in a sudden warmth and pressure as Eddie wrapped his arms around his abdomen, like he was trying to hug his symbiote through his skin.

“You’re back,” he said, then spoke to Dan. “He’s back!” 

The glee was mutual. Oxytocin flooded their shared synapses, and the universe went soft and warm. Rain drummed on the windows, the world slowly coming back. 

There was no better feeling on Earth. 

Venom embraced their heart again, as though hugging it, and tried to avoid listening to Dan’s list of risk factors.  They all knew what  _ previous cardiac stress  _ meant in this context, and the reality of it was nauseating. 

This was a consequence of parasitism. Of early, misguided attempts at survival. 

**I’m sorry.**

The words were insufficient. 

“You didn’t know.” Eddie mumbled his answer in the tone people used to talk to themselves, quiet and intimate. Venom offered a tactile reply and surveyed a heartwrenching amount of damage.

Too much dead muscle, a great dark stain across the ventricular wall, isolated from the ripple of each independent beat. Delicate exploration of the inner chambers revealed its reach; the cells were quiet all the way through. 

“ **We need flesh,** ” Venom spoke with Eddie’s body, still unsure of the stress of manifesting properly. Then, at Dan’s apparent alarm—  “ **Protein and glucose. To rebuild.** ” 

“You need an echocardiogram.” Dan countered. “So we can see the damage.” 

“ **_We_ ** **already can.** ” Venom protested. “ **And** **_we_ ** **know how to fix it.** ” 

In truth, he just didn’t want Dan  _ looking  _ at it. His mistakes laid bare by medical technology. 

“It’s probably cheaper to just go to In-n-out.” Eddie added, sensing his other’s anxiety. “Or, or, just get… steak?” he continued, trying to deflect the inevitable argument. “We really don’t like hospitals.”

“It’ll be twenty minutes.” 

To his credit, it was fifteen.

Recovery was the difficult part, even with a vast supply of nutrients to work with. Cardiomyocytes didn’t like to divide, and poking around in their DNA would have been risky. So Venom spent the night weaving his way through their heart’s wall, building new muscle cell by intricate cell. Construction at the molecular level. It had to be perfect. 

He didn’t rest until every single dead cell was replaced. Until he could be lulled by the sound of their heartbeat as he remembered it. As it had been before Eddie’s body was interrupted, and as it would remain. 

Steady and strong. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Bibliography, because I'm VERY silly: 
> 
> VogonProstetnicMo (2019) discord message to the author, 13th February.
> 
> Yip, A. and Saw, J. (2015). Spontaneous coronary artery dissection—A review. Cardiovascular Diagnosis & Therapy, 5(1), pp.37–48.
> 
> www.heart.org. (2019). Ventricular Fibrillation. [online] Available at: https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/arrhythmia/about-arrhythmia/ventricular-fibrillation [Accessed 7 Feb. 2019].
> 
> VON HARSDORF, R. (2001). Can cardiomyocytes divide?. Heart, 86(5), pp.481-482.
> 
> Healthline. (2019). Widowmaker Heart Attack: Definition, Symptoms, Survival, and More. [online] Available at: https://www.healthline.com/health/widowmaker-heart-attack#risk-factors [Accessed 8 Feb. 2019].


End file.
